George Bornstein, from "Romancing the (Native) Stone: Yeats, Stevens, and the Anglocentric Canon," in Gene W. Ruoff, ed., The Romantics and Us: Essays on Literature and Culture (Rutgers University Press, 1990).

Playing on Douglas Hyde's influential 1892 lecture, "The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland," George Bornstein analyzes the efforts of Yeats and Stevens to "de-Anglicize Romanicism." After his meeting with the old Fenian, John O'Leary, Yeats altered the subject matter of his verse, abandoning his earlier classical settings to write about Irish places and themes. Following terms defined by Robert Weisbuch, however, Bornstein regards this as only a partial departure from the English Romantic tradition. To achieve a genuinely Irish or American Romanticism, it would be necessary to find a new sensibility, and express it in language distinctive to its place.

The contrast lies not just in content but in technique, particularly the substitution of an impassioned speaking voice ("battered, badgered and destroyed") for a dreamy, over-literary one ("The willow of the many-sorrowed world"). Yeats's celebrated thematic "movement downwards upon life"•1• after 1906 was matched by a technical one as well. He later recalled, "I tried to make the language of poetry coincide with that of passionate, normal speech" and "as I altered my syntax I altered my intellect" (E&I521, 530). The new diction and syntax replaced the derivative, strongly English patterns of fin-de-siécle poetry this way: "The common verse of Britain from 1890 to 1910 was a horrible agglomerate compost, not minted, most of it not even baked, all legato, a doughy mess of third-hand Keats, Wordsworth, heaven knows what, fourth-hand Elizabethan sonority blunted, half melted, lumpy" (LE205). In the present context, I emphasize that the modernist patterns replacing those described by Pound are predominantly Irish and American rather than British—the patterns of Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Frost, Williams, and Stevens. They help account for why the diverse language of literary modernism appeals so strongly to English-language poets around the world today: it has already de-centered England and prepared the ground for further such enterprises.•2• In Yeats's case, the new way he wrote poetry enabled him to renegotiate the relation between Ireland and England in his poetry, and to de-Anglicize his own romanticism.

Notes

1. W. B. Yeats, The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), 469.

2. Hugh Kenner has recently noted the decentering of the English language from England, though his emphasis on cosmopolitans like Pound and Eliot leads him to view the language of International Modernism as free from any particular nationhood. In A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), which appeared after the present article was written, he says: "English by about 1930 had ceased to be simply the language they speak in England. It had been split four ways. It was (1) the language of International Modernism, having displaced French in that role. And it was (2) the literary language of Ireland, and (3) of America, and yes, (4) of England, countries which International Modernism bids us think of as the Three Provinces" (pp.3-4).